Reopening the question of women priests: A theological travesty and a spiritual tragedy (Comment)

This journal, published by the Jesuits but vetted by the Vatican
Secretariat of State, has long been a means of communicating lines of
thought which reigning popes consider important.

Therefore, the kindest
way to describe this particular article is “peculiar”.

It is, in fact,
peculiar in at least three serious ways: politically, administratively,
and theologically.

When I say “politically peculiar”, I am applying the idea of
political correctness to the Church. The question here is what sort of
“political atmosphere” prevails in the Vatican under Pope Francis. What
viewpoints do the subtle clues of the powerful indicate are open for
discussion, and what viewpoints are discouraged to the point of exiling
those who articulate them? We already know, for example, that it is
considered very good form to lament the “rigidity” of all who choose to
emphasize that adherence to Catholic doctrine and moral teaching is
required of us by Jesus Christ.

This consideration of the “political atmosphere” is relevant to La Civilta Cattolica
because of its unique status. Since its establishment in Rome in 1850,
the journal has served as a kind of unofficial voice of the Holy See. It
is the only periodical in the world for which each issue is examined
and revised as needed by Vatican personnel, and each issue must be
approved prior to publication.

At the very least, then, the current
understanding within the Vatican is that challenging established
Catholic teaching is not frowned upon. Such challenges are not the kind
of thing that gets a writer into trouble.

Administrative incompetence?

The publication of this article is also “administratively peculiar”.
Again, at the very minimum, it implies that the oversight of La Civilta Cattolica
by the office of the Secretariat of State is seriously inadequate.

But
the situation could easily be even worse. If that oversight is actually
adequate—in other words, if the Secretariat of State knowledgeably and
deliberately approved publication—then either the Secretariat of State
is incompetent or it has received cues from Pope Francis that raising
doubts about settled Catholic doctrine is desirable.

Given what has happened with the question of reception of Communion
by those who are divorced and remarried without an annulment, the latter
possibility certainly comes to mind.

Pope Francis has clearly
encouraged the conclusion that reception of Communion should be possible
in some cases after a period of careful discernment, and yet he did not
actually go that far in his official text (Amoris Laetitia), nor has he issued a revision to Canon Law, which directly prohibits this privately-encouraged practice.

Strategic use of La Civilta Cattolica
is another way to encourage ideas and practices which the Holy Spirit
would never permit a pope to specify magisterially. It is impossible not
to imagine that this is part of an unfortunate pattern.

This possibility of papal approval is rendered even stronger by the Pope’s strong commendation of the editorial staff of Civilta Cattolica
immediately following the publication of the article which questioned
the permanence of the Church’s teaching that women cannot be priests.

Among other things, Francis told the staff that their journal “continues
courageously to navigate open waters”, counseling that Catholics should
“never be afraid of open waters, and must never seek the shelter of
safe harbors.”

One can wiggle around to suggest that the Pope must surely be
referring only to the danger of clinging to mere human opinions.

But
Francis speaks in these terms so broadly and frequently that we can only
wonder if the Church herself, not to mention her members, has somehow
lost her ability to distinguish what is Divinely permanent in the
Christian dispensation from transitory human interpretations.

Are we
really so wrong, for example, to cling to the certainty of the
Resurrection of Jesus Christ?

Theological Peculiarity

Surely a moment’s reflections enables us to see that attempting to
reopen the question of the ordination of women is peculiar in one more
way: It is “theologically peculiar”, and that is putting it very mildly.

This is so because of the deliberately-intended definitive manner in
which Pope St. John Paul II settled this question—clearly once and for
all—in his 1994 Apostolic Letter, Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

After a brief discussion of the topic in three numbered sections, the
Pope stated his conclusion in No. 4, which I will quote in its entirety:

4. Although the teaching that priestly ordination is to be
reserved to men alone has been preserved by the constant and universal
Tradition of the Church and firmly taught by the Magisterium in its more
recent documents, at the present time in some places it is nonetheless
considered still open to debate, or the Church’s judgment that women are
not to be admitted to ordination is considered to have a merely
disciplinary force.

Wherefore, in order that all doubt may be removed regarding a
matter of great importance, a matter which pertains to the Church’s
divine constitution itself, in virtue of my ministry of confirming the
brethren (cf. Lk 22:32) I declare that the Church has no authority
whatsoever to confer priestly ordination on women and that this judgment
is to be definitively held by all the Church’s faithful.

It is simply not possible for the Magisterium to speak more clearly than that.

In fact Pope Francis himself seemed to say as much
during the in-flight interview following his visit to Sweden: “As for
the ordination of women in the Catholic Church, the last clear word was
given by Saint John Paul II, and this holds.”

It is telling that Fr. Pani, in suggesting a reopening of the
question, gave as his reason what he described as tensions between the
Church’s teaching and the work of theologians.

At the risk of slipping
down a rabbit hole, this grows curiouser and curiouser. Peculiar in the
extreme, this perpetuates a false view of theology that was developed by
dissident theologians during the twentieth-century, and still affects
huge numbers of academic theologians today.

We absolutely must shake out
of our woolly heads the notion that the task of theologians is to
reflect on cultural changes as if they can discern in them new and
changed fundamental truths of the Faith.

Real theology

In reality it is impossible for a theologian who understands the
nature of his discipline to find that his theological perceptions put
him at odds with the teaching of the Church. Each discipline has its own
proper subject matter and methods.

The subject matter proper to
theology is Divine Revelation, which is expressed and clarified only in
Scripture, Tradition, and the Magisterium of the Church, all of which
are guaranteed free from error by the Holy Spirit.

Thus it is the role
of the Catholic theologian to seek to penetrate the meaning of
Revelation ever more fully, explaining it with greater depth and more
precise understanding as study continues over time.

There can never be a legitimate tension between the Church’s teaching
and the work of theologians, for the simple reason that the Church’s
teaching is part of the theological data which the theologian seeks to
understand. Theology is always faith seeking understanding through the
study of Revelation.

Apart from that, theologians have no subject
matter, and so there can be no discipline called “theology” at all.

In
this case, the implicit Modernism of the author comes through clearly,
as it always does in writings of this type, in the complaint that the
CDF statement in 1995, which reminded us that Pope John Paul II’s
teaching was definitive, “does not take into account the developments
that the presence of woman in the family and in society have undergone
in the 21st century.”

But these cultural developments, whether good or bad, are not the
data of theology at all. What they are is a source of additional
questions which theologians may need to address more clearly based on
renewed study of the revealed data with new concerns in mind.

In fact,
Pope St. John Paul II did this himself in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.

In considering exactly this sort of question, arising precisely from
cultural issues which had in fact long since come to the fore, John Paul
wrote:

Furthermore, the fact that the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother
of God and Mother of the Church, received neither the mission proper to
the Apostles nor the ministerial priesthood clearly shows that the
non-admission of women to priestly ordination cannot mean that women are
of lesser dignity, nor can it be construed as discrimination against
them. Rather, it is to be seen as the faithful observance of a plan to
be ascribed to the wisdom of the Lord of the universe. [3]

That, my friends, is an exercise in theology, and it is a great trial
in our time that so many of those who play a role in clarifying
Catholic doctrine lack even a basic understanding of what it means to
master so sublime a discipline.

This effort to extract changes in
Catholic doctrine from cultural trends has always been a sure sign that a
theologian submits his mind not to Christ and the Church, but to the
spirit of the age. Theology without fidelity to Revelation is not
theology at all.

Finally, I am saddened once again to see evidence that Pope Francis
does not believe it to be a significant part of his responsibility as
the Vicar of Christ to protect the faithful against whatever weakens
their trust in the permanence of the teachings of the Catholic Church.

Too often, Francis even suggests the opposite—that this trust is
actually misplaced. We need to remember that when Our Lord rebuked the
Pharisees, he did not speak about their “rigidity” generally, but rather
about their unvarying commitment to the wrong things, by which he meant
their worldly ways of thinking:

And he said to them: “Well did Isaiah prophesy of you hypocrites, as
it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart
is far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the
precepts of men.’ You leave the commandment of God, and hold fast the
tradition of men.” [Mk 7:6-8]

These words of Jesus Christ are directly applicable to La Civilta Cattolica’s
faulty approach to the ordination of women as priests.

To make the
point even more strongly, here is what Christ in glory told St. John to
convey to the Church in the third chapter of the Book of Revelation: “I
am coming soon; hold fast what you have, so that no one may seize your
crown.”